Featured Research

from universities, journals, and other organizations

Fastest-rotating massive star ever recorded

Date:

December 5, 2011

Source:

University of California - Santa Barbara

Summary:

An international team of scientists has found the fastest-rotating massive star ever recorded. The star spins around its axis at the speed of 600 kilometers per second at the equator, a rotational velocity so high that the star is nearly tearing apart due to centrifugal forces.

Share This

This is an artist's concept of the fastest-rotating massive star found to date. The massive, bright young star, called VFTS 102, rotates at about two million kilometers per hour. Centrifugal force from this dizzying spin rate has flattened the star into an oblate shape, and spun off a disk of hot plasma, seen edge on in this view from a hypothetical planet. The star may have "spun up" by accreting material from a binary companion star. Scientists believe that the rapidly evolving companion star later exploded as a supernova. The whirling star lies 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

An international team of scientists has found the fastest-rotating massive star ever recorded. The star spins around its axis at the speed of 600 kilometers per second at the equator, a rotational velocity so high that the star is nearly tearing apart due to centrifugal forces.

Related Articles

This confirms a prediction put forward by astrophysicist Matteo Cantiello, a postdoctoral fellow with UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, who contributed to the discovery published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The observations were made at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, as part of a survey of the heaviest and brightest stars in a region called the Tarantula Nebula. The Tarantula Nebula is a region of star formation located in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light years from Earth. The reported star, VFTS 102, is extremely hot and luminous, shining about 100,000 times more brightly than the sun. According to the research team, this star had a violent past and was ejected from a double star system by its exploding companion star.

Cantiello and collaborators explained that stars could reach such rapid rotation via a "cosmic dance" with another star so close that gravity strips gas from its surface. "This gas falls onto the companion star, increasing the mass and spinning it up," said Cantiello. "Similar to a tennis ball spinning fast after being hit by a glancing blow, a star rotates quickly after being hit off-center by the in-falling gas."

Cantiello previously predicted the possibility of observing this type of star. He reported this theoretical finding with Sung-Chul Yoon, Norbert Langer, and Mario Livio in a paper published in 2007 in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters. This theoretical investigation of stars in binary systems predicted extreme rotational velocities after mass accretion. The observed rotational velocity for the star agrees with this prediction.

The star is unusual not only because it rotates so fast, but also because it is moving away from its neighboring stars at a velocity of about 70,000 miles per hour, or 30 kilometers per second. "Having been part of a binary system could explain this space oddity," said Cantiello. "It has been known for over 40 years that a star in a massive binary system can be shot away from its surroundings when the companion ends its life in a spectacular explosion called a supernova. In our theoretical calculations we noticed that the 'spun-up' star would also be moving from its surroundings at a high rate. It is very exciting to find a star that matches both of these predictions."

The star is located close to a pulsar and a supernova remnant, which may be left over from the companion star that once spun-up the observed star. If confirmed, this would provide additional support for the theoretical explanation put forward by Cantiello and collaborators in 2007.

Cantiello said that this star may produce dramatic fireworks as it dies. Such a rapidly rotating, massive star is believed to be the progenitor of some of the brightest explosions in the universe: gamma-ray bursts. These occur when the star's fast rotation produces powerful jets of light and matter.

Mar. 2, 2015  Dust plays an extremely important role in the universe -- both in the formation of planets and new stars. But the earliest galaxies had no dust, only gas. Now an international team of astronomers has ... full story

Mar. 2, 2015  NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned new images captured on approach to its historic orbit insertion at the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn will be the first mission to successfully visit a dwarf planet when ... full story

Mar. 2, 2015  An international team of researchers has demonstrated a way to assess the quality of water on Earth from space by using satellite technology that can visualize pollution levels otherwise invisible to ... full story

Feb. 27, 2015  A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form that can metabolize and reproduce similar to life on Earth has been modeled. It is theorized to have a cell membrane, composed of small organic ... full story

Feb. 27, 2015  Astronomers using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, have found a cluster of stars forming at the very edge of our Milky Way galaxy. This is the first time astronomers ... full story

Feb. 26, 2015  If you put a camera in the ice machine and watched water turn into ice, the process would look simple. But the mechanism behind liquids turning to solids is actually quite complex, and understanding ... full story

Feb. 26, 2015  Like a cowboy at a rodeo, NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), has triumphantly raised its "arm" and unfurled a huge golden "lasso" (antenna) that it will ... full story

Feb. 26, 2015  New research by an astrophysicist provides revelations about the most energetic event in the universe -- the merging of two spinning, orbiting black holes into a much larger black ... full story

Feb. 26, 2015  The MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever three-dimensional view of the deep universe. After staring at the Hubble Deep Field South region for only 27 ... full story

More Coverage

Dec. 5, 2011  The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has picked up the fastest rotating star found so far. This massive bright young star lies in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic ... read more

Oct. 11, 2012  The Universe is filled with mysterious objects. Many of them are as strange as they are beautiful. Among these, planetary nebulae are probably one of the most fascinating objects to behold in the ... full story

Oct. 8, 2012  Researchers have developed a model which explains how the spin of a pulsar slows down as the star gets older. A pulsar is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star which was formed from the remains ... full story

Nov. 3, 2011  Astronomers have tracked down the first gamma-ray pulsar in a globular cluster of stars. It is around 27,000 light years away and thus also holds the distance record in this class of objects. ... full story

Oct. 15, 2010  How do astronomers weigh a star that's trillions of miles away and way too big to fit on a bathroom scale? In most cases they can't, although they can get a best estimate using computer ... full story

ScienceDaily features breaking news and videos about the latest discoveries in health, technology, the environment, and more -- from major news services and leading universities, scientific journals, and research organizations.